Musa Publishing: Musa Publishing Announces Deal With Author Gary K....

Some AWESOME NEWS from Musa, the publisher of my collection, Silhouette of Darkness. Musa is publishing the third book in the Roger Rabbit series!

Click on the link to read the entire announcement!

Musa Publishing: Musa Publishing Announces Deal With Author Gary K....:  Musa Publishing, an independent digital-first publisher, has announced today that they will publish Who Wacked Roger Rabbit? by author ...

Do You Believe in Ghosts? Stories in my new book SILHOUETTE OF DARKNESS Explore this Universal Theme

It is wonderful that five thousand years have now elapsed since the creation of the world, and still it is undecided whether or not there has ever been an instance of the spirit of any person appearing after death. All argument is against it; but all belief is for it.

-SAMUEL JOHNSON, The Life of Samuel Johnson

This quote is as true today as ever. Even though the show Ghost Hunters and its countless imitators has offered a certain level of proof spirits exist, most often that evidence is still not nearly enough to win over stanch skeptics.

Over two hundred more years have passed since Johnson wrote this—two hundred years of vast technological advancement—and still, this subject comes down to the simple notion of belief vs. disbelief.

Fiction provides an effective venue where this debate can be mediated in a safe environment. While readers entertain the notion that ghost smay exist, we are safe in this created world we can leave at any time, compared to a more extreme form of experiment, such as agreeing to attend a séance or serious session with a Ouija board.

In his book The Fantastic (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1975), Tsvetan Todorov offers one of the best explanations of how readers participate in a “gothic hesitation” to sort out this potentially disturbing subject.

The fantastic, we have seen, lasts only as long as a certain hesitation: a hesitation common to reader and character, who must decide whether or not what they perceive derives from reality as it exists in the common opinion. At the story's end, the reader makes a decision even if the character does not; he opts for one solution or the other, and thereby emerges from the fantastic. If he decides that the laws of reality remain intact and permit an explanation of the phenomena described, we say that the work belongs to another genre: the uncanny. If, on the contrary, he decides that new laws of nature must be entertained to account for the phenomena, we enter the genre of the marvelous.

I have had my own brushes with the uncanny and found there is always a frustration when trying to relay the experience to a friend later on. In the moment, I was positive I was faced with the “new laws of nature” Todorov presents, and that “all belief was for it,” but once I began explaining it to another person, the certainty became diminished with each passing word I tried to place upon it.

This is why ghost stories are so popular. We read the book, or watch the film, and can safely entertain the notion, in the guise of fiction, that we accept the supernatural as real. We are safe there. We wander the halls of The Overlook or Hill House expecting entertainment but also to enter the world of the what if, the Todorovian hesitation that allows for the real possibility that the spirit world is real.

My new collection, Silhouette of Darkness includes two ghost stories.

The Blues in A Minor

Since surviving a tragic accident, Mona is troubled by blackouts. Waking from one of these spells, she enters an eerie tenement and discovers Zach, a young man who plays blues guitar that speaks to her soul.

An Act of Naming
Norman wanders the streets after a night of drinking and meets Angela, a homeless amnesiac. The moment their eyes meet is the beginning of an evening of mystery.

These stories are not meant to frighten or disturb, as are most of the other selections in Silhouette of Darkness. Rather, they explore the classic themes at the heart of every ghost story—who are the ghosts and more importantly why are they spirits? What has trapped them in the region between life and whatever exists beyond death?

To read these ghost stories, and eleven other tales of horror and dark fantasy, check out Silhouette of Darkness, available in all electronic formats through Musa Publishing  here:

http://musapublishing.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=397

Penumbra eMag: Why We Love Dread--Great Article on the subject!

Penumbra eMag: Why We Love Dread: by Karen Heuler Hitchcock knew that anticipation of a bomb’s explosion created more tension than the explosion itself. We are seduced by e...

MONSTERS ABOUND IN MY NEW HORROR COLLECTION SILHOUETTE OF DARKNESS

My childhood was immersed in reruns of old monster movies and other creepy stuff from the Fifties and Sixties. I remember staying up late on Saturday nights (if I could stay awake) with my Dad, watching Bob Wilkins hosting “Creature Features” in the San Francisco Bay Area. Those great old films knew how to scare us without relying on gore and exploitation.


I write all kinds of horror but particularly like to create work that harkens back to those early days of monster cinema without overtly stealing their tropes. Readers of my fiction know I write very few vampires, werewolves, and other traditional monsters. While these creatures make an occasional appearance, I tend to create my own original monsters, or at least my own hybrids or mutations of what has come before.

Buy from Publisher in all e-book formats

In Silhouette of Darkness, my new e-book release from Musa Publishing, you will find these “Creature Features”:

Fatal Insomnia

The central idea of this story began with the characters, not the monster. I wanted to write a story in one setting, with a few characters who were isolated together for some time, and going slowly mad. I would pick up their story far down the road, on the night that everything went to Hell.

I wrote about three siblings and their best friend living in a farmhouse, and after sketching them a bit I decided that, for some still unknown reason, they were forced to stay awake all night and sleep during the day. Their normal circadian rhythms disrupted, this was the pressure that drove them to the breaking point.

The monster of this story, The Blight, took shape from this central idea. I wanted the creature to be a bizarre construction of unknown origin. The knowledge that one must stay awake all night to avoid being its victim came from experience with it, not because anyone understood exactly what was going on.

I hope you agree The Blight is worthy of comparison to some of the stranger monster movies of old, and perhaps even a nod to one of my favorite masters of the horror, H. P. Lovecraft.

Jerrod’s Brood

I remember being very creeped out by the film “Willard.” Watching it now, it seems a bit corny, but the whole notion of a loser like Willard communing with rats and becoming their master is still disturbing. I wanted to take another loser and “bless” him (or curse him, depending on your viewpoint) with a brood of his own, creatures that seem to appear from nowhere but bond to him immediately.

Read this story to find out where life takes this poor soul on this fateful night.

Ashton Howard’ Dark Process

Carnivals are fun but they can also be a bit scary, right? Whether it’s the Bradbury classic “Something Wicked this Way Comes,” the clown in “It,” or some of the characters in the B-movies exploiting the carnie life, at one time or another we have all mused about the possibility that all may not be as merry with carnivals and circuses as they appear on the surface.

I wanted to take the idea of the freak show and give it a bit of a horror twist. What if there are no actual “freaks of nature,” but instead an evil mad scientist is creating them?

Read this short story and learn secret behind the sideshow “Ashton Howard’s Tent of Oddities.”

These are just three of the creatures I created in the dark tales found in Silhouette of Darkness.

STILL CAN’T GET ENOUGH MONSTERS?

CHECK OUT MY FLASH FICTION ANTHOLOGY, MONSTER GALLERY

Buy from Amazon

As editor of this collection, I simply put out a call for flash fiction featuring monsters. No more specific conditions on content. I received hundreds of tales of wondrous and horrible creatures, some humorous, others poignant, many quite disturbing.

The end result is 93 flash fiction stories of every type of monster imaginable by these great writers.

Jeffrey Thomas, author of the Punktown series and many other stories and novels, provided a wonderful introduction on the subject at hand.

Check it out at the Amazon purchase link below the cover image.

So if you like monsters, you need look no further Silhouette of Darkness and Monster Gallery. What are you waiting for?

As always, if you check out either or both of these books, I would be most greateful if you left your thoughts in comments on Goodreads, Amazon, or any other review forum.

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